For creators · Private label
Salt Road develops, manufactures, and ships your own gluten-free, vegetarian food brand from a strictly no-gluten facility in Paterson, NJ. You fund the project. You own everything that comes out of it.
The deal, plainly
You're paying for a service. The recipe, the brand, the inventory — all yours. We do the food work; you do the marketing. That's the whole arrangement.
Who this is for
The economics only work for people with reach into a community that buys food. We don't have a follower minimum — we have a willingness-to-invest minimum.
Your audience has a medical reason to read every label. A product they can trust is a product they'll buy from you.
Cookbook authors, recipe accounts, lifestyle creators. Your kitchen point of view becomes the shelf-stable version.
If your audience already pays attention to ingredients, they'll pay attention to your product.
Not the right fit
Pricing
Where you start depends on what you bring. All three starter paths end at the same place — a finished first run ready to sell. Reorders move onto our standard co-packing terms.
From our catalog
from $5,000
$5,000 minimum first order.
Catalog formulations are shared across customers. Your brand, packaging, and inventory are yours.
Bring your recipe
from $5,000
Two test batches plus a first production run.
Assumes your recipe scales as-is. Nutritional analysis, shelf-life testing, and packaging consulting available as add-ons or as part of the full-development tier.
Idea only
from $15,000
We develop the product from scratch.
More complex categories — multi-component products, regulated processes, custom packaging tooling — quote higher. We give you a fixed scope before any money moves.
All starter prices cover Salt Road's labor, food-safety supervision, and project management. You pay for ingredients, packaging materials, and any third-party lab fees (nutritional analysis, shelf-life testing) separately, at cost.
After launch
Once you're past the first run, production schedules against your forecast: production time at our hourly rate, ingredients and packaging at cost plus handling, with storage and fulfillment-handoff options. See our co-packing service for the production-side details.
How it works
A 30-minute call about your audience, the product you have in mind, and your timeline.
A fixed scope and price for the starter project. Nothing moves until you sign.
Benchtop iterations until you taste it and approve. We handle nutritional analysis and shelf-life in parallel.
We schedule production, run it, pack it, and hand off finished inventory ready to sell.
As your audience buys, we schedule reorders against forecast under standard co-pack terms.
FAQ
You do. This is not a licensing deal and Salt Road does not take an equity or royalty stake. You fund the work, and you own the formulation, the brand, and the inventory we produce for you.
No. This service is for creators who have an audience and are ready to put capital behind a product. We're a manufacturer, not a venture backer. If you're looking for someone to fund the launch in exchange for a stake, this isn't the right fit.
There's no hard number, but a project needs to clear $5,000–$15,000 in upfront labor cost, plus ingredients, packaging, and inventory you can actually move. Most creators with an engaged audience of 50,000 or more in the gluten-free, Celiac, vegetarian, or wellness space have the reach to make this work.
Salt Road is a strictly gluten-free, vegetarian facility — no gluten or meat ever crosses the threshold. We make shelf-stable and refrigerated foods: baked goods, snacks, mixes, sauces, dressings, granolas, energy bites, spice blends, beverages, and similar categories. Anything in your formulation has to fit those rules.
We have a set of proven gluten-free, vegetarian products — granolas, snack bars, dressings, baking mixes, and similar — already developed and approved for production in our facility. No licensing or formulation fees. Place a first order at the $5,000 minimum and brand and package it as your own. Ask us for the current catalog.
No. Our pricing covers Salt Road's labor, food-safety supervision, and project management. Ingredients, packaging materials, and any third-party lab fees (nutritional analysis, shelf-life testing) are billed separately at cost as we incur them.
Brand identity and label design, photography, e-commerce setup, paid ads, and influencer marketing of any kind. We focus on making the product, scheduling production, and shipping. We can refer you to designers and 3PLs we trust.
Most projects take 8 to 16 weeks from the first call to a finished first production run, depending on category complexity, packaging lead times, and how decisive you are on the formulation.
Reorders run on our standard co-packing terms. We schedule production runs against your forecast, you pay for materials and production time, and we ship to you or to a fulfillment partner.
Yes. You own the formulation. If you outgrow us or find a better fit, you can take the recipe and go. We'd rather have you happy than have you stuck.
Start a project
Quick reply, no pitch. If it's a fit we'll send a scoped quote within a week.
Want to gut-check the product idea first? A $99 Idea Check tells you whether there's a real market before you invest in a launch.